The problem with streaming services is that there are so many of them now competing for content that the quality of what they are showing has reached an all-time low.

Not only is their original content suffering, so are the theatrically released films they are premiering. Take for example, the most watched film of last week on Netflix – The Snowman.

The Snowman has a great pedigree. The 2017 film was based on a popular Norwegian mystery novel starring Michael Fassbender, directed by Tomas Alfredson (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and produced by, amongst others, Martin Scorsese whose longtime editor Thema Schoonmaker and her fellow Oscar-winning editor Claire Simpson (Platoon) shared editing responsibilities. Why then, had most of us never heard of it? The reason is that it was a notorious flop, a sleep-inducing mess of a film that should have stayed buried.

The film opens interestingly enough with a scene involving a young boy, his mother, and the boy’s mysteriously bullying uncle. It proceeds to a scene involving the boy and his mother in a car chasing the uncle’s car that ends with the car sinking in the ice and the mother drowning, seemingly by suicide. Flash forward to the present in which Fassbender and Rebecca Ferguson appear as cops. What do they have to do with the opening sequence? Eventually we will find out, but the rest of the film has the same awkward lapses in continuity and credulity until the film mercifully ends.

How could a film with two of the most renowned film editors in charge be one of the most poorly edited films of all time? According to the director, several scenes that would have connected the dots were not filmed. OK, but what accounts for the usually fascinating Fassbender walking through the film in a catatonic state? And why hire such good actors as Charlotte Gainsbourg, J.K. Simmons, Toby Jones, Chloe Sevigny, James D’Arcy, Adrian Dunbar, Anne Reid, and a poorly dubbed Val Kilmer, and give them practically nothing to do? It’s a puzzlement.

No wonder steaming services are losing customers right and left.

On the physical media front, three films that matter have been newly released in beautifully rendered 4K Blu-ray upgrades with the usual bells and whistles for those of us who want to have them in our collections in the most pristine condition available. They are Rebel Without a Cause from Warner Home Video, and 12 Angry Men and Serpico from Kino Lorber.

Rebel Without a Cause was the second of only three films in which screen legend James Dean starred.

After appearing in minor roles in several films of the early 1950s, Dean was given the lead in Elia Kazan’s film of the last section of John Steinbeck’s mammoth East of Eden. Released in April 1955, it was an immediate sensation, so much so that Jack Warner ordered the black-and-white footage of the programmer Dean was then working on scrapped and refilmed in color as one of the year’s prestige films. That was Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause in which Dean played a disaffected youth who not only has trouble with authority but in making friends as well.

After completing the film, Dean went into George Stevens’ Giant in which he starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Days after completing that film, he was famously killed in a car crash on September 30, 1955. Rebel Without a Cause was released less than a month later, becoming an instant cult classic.

At the time, East of Eden was considered the more important film containing Dean’s best performance but over time Rebel Without a Cause has become the film that has registered most with younger generations. Both were Oscar nominees, but oddly neither was nominated for Best Picture.

East of Eden was nominated for Best Actor (Dean), Director, Screenplay, and Supporting Actress resulting in a win for Jo Van Fleet as Dean’s estranged mother. Rebel Without a Cause was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Sal Mineo), Supporting Actress (Natalie Wood), and Screenplay (Ray’s consolation for not being nominated for Best Director). Warner’s sole nominee for Best Picture was John Ford and Mervyn Leroy’s film version of Mister Roberts, which brought Henry Fonda back to the screen after a seven-year absence and earned Jack Lemmon an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Two years later, Fonda produced and starred in Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, based on Reginald Rose’s 1954 teleplay starring Robert Cummings. Jack Lemmon starred in a highly successful 1997 TV remake. The tense jury room drama has been imitated many times but never equaled. It was nominated for three Oscars, Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. Fonda as producer received his only Oscar nomination between his two acting nominations for 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath and 1981’s On Golden Pond for which he finally won.

Lumet was also the director of 1973’s Serpico, the hard-hitting biographical crime drama that Al Pacino starred in between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II.

Pacino played the young cop who blew the whistle on police corruption in New York City, which resulted in his being shunned by his fellow cops.

The film started out awards season well with Pacino sharing the Best Actor award of the National Board of Review with Robert Ryan who won posthumously for The Iceman Cometh. He was runner-up to Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris for both the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards. He then outpolled Brando to win the Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama. The film itself was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture – Drama, losing to The Exorcist.

Serpico won the Writers Guild award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, and Lumet was nominated by the Directors Guild for Best Director. By the time the Oscar nominations came out in late February 1974 enthusiasm for the film had cooled and it was only nominated for Best Actor and Adapted Screenplay, losing both. Pacino lost to Jack Lemmon who won a second Oscar for Save the Tiger while Salt and Wexler lost to William Peter Blatty for The Exorcist.

Happy viewing, everyone.